So Santorini?
So, Santorini. Yeah. Some final thoughts.
Santorini is beautiful.
Truly beautiful. Out-of-this-world, spectacularly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Almost every place you go has a view of blue water and sky, blindingly white domes, and green islands. Like Macchu Picchu, it’s one-of-a-kind. I can’t blame the locals for selling it or the tourists for flocking to it.
Santorini’s terrain is challenging.
Santorini, like much of Greece, is rough underfoot and hard to navigate. Even the paths in the most developed towns are cobbled and either go up or down; nothing is ever flat. It would be very difficult to be here if you aren’t a strong walker, or if you have to push a stroller or wheelchair. High heels would be downright dangerous.
I can’t overstate the need to walk uphill. Our AirBnB advertised a “public parking lot only a few steps away!” This might be true if you consider 150 yards straight uphill “only a few steps”. Also, that uphill walk is along the main drag through Megalochori, so you have to share it with cars driving through, and the inevitable caravans of four-wheelers; be prepared to jump into a doorway or press yourself against a wall as they pass.
Santorini doesn’t feel like Greece.
Santorini does not feel like Greece to me. Sure, the place is run by Greek people, but most of them aren’t locals; the majority of hospitality workers appear to be transient, coming in March to work the high season and then returning to Thessaloniki or Athens or Patras in November.
Santorini Dave (an actual expert on Santorini!) has posted numerous photos of taverna food that do look Greek, so I have no doubt there are excellent, genuinely Greek restaurants. But there’s no way all those ingredients are local. This is not Embonas in Rhodes, where Manolis gathers eggs from his own hens and picks tomatoes and peppers from his own garden to put in that day’s meals. Frozen, by ferry, from Athens is most likely what you get here.
In Conclusion…
I know many love Santorini, and I’m sure it’s a charming place if you know how to work it. But for my part–well, I kind of hated it.
It feels artificial.
Chris and I once spent an evening in the Swiss town of Grindelwald watching evening fall on the north face of the Eiger. We sat on our balcony, watching the lights twinkle on in the Mitteleggi Hutte and trying to pick out famous points on the Eiger Nordwand—the Spider’s Web, the Death Bivouac (“…a welcome and unexpected luxury…”. Climbers are crazy.) But we also watched the crowds of tourists below us on the Dorfstraße. Thousands of people walked past, joining the audience of a street concert or heading to the Mini-Golf across the street from our hotel. And no one looked up to admire the mountain, the starkly beautiful, dangerous mountain that was presumably what brought them to this crowded little town.
That’s how I felt spending an afternoon by the pool with our fellow tourists from Washington State. They were happy, to be sure, but they were making good progress toward being drunk as skunks several hours before they were due to attend one of the most serious ceremonies in a person’s life. They were happy to be in Greece, but they could have been in Mexico or St. Croix, or Destin, and not noticed the difference. That is not in itself bad; we all find fun where we see it. But if this is what Santorini is selling, I don’t want to buy it. It’s an awfully long way to travel just to get drunk.
